Back in ancient times, when individual datums were hard to come by and therefore perceived as valuable, people trusted almost all of the data that came their way. Later, data became so plentiful that people could afford to disbelieve some of it, make judgements about its quality, speculate about the possible motives…
Visit carlos.bueno.org → RSS feedOn Hacker News Oct 2011 – Jun 2014
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There's a problem with Silicon Valley and the subcultures that imitate it. It's a design bug woven into people's identities and sense of self-worth. Fixing it will be painful. Influential and otherwise very smart people will deny till their last breath that it even exists. But I believe it should be fixed before it…
Lauren Ipsum is trying to get past Jane Hecate, a little old lady who holds the Book of Passwords. Jane is older and can't see well, so she has to spell out Lauren's guess letter by letter to check whether it's the right password. How can Lauren use this to her advantage? A story about computer science and other…
Before I talk about my own troubles, let me tell you about another book, “ Computer Game Bot Turing Test ”. It's one of over 100,000 “books” “written” by a Markov chain running over random Wikipedia articles, bundled up and sold online for a ridiculous price. The publisher, Betascript, is notorious for this kind of…
Fair Coins are the currency of Userland. A Fair Coin flips fifty-fifty with mathematical exactness. In the real world most coins are pretty fair, but you never know whether there might be a small bias to one side or another. This presents Lauren Ipsum , a girl who's lost in Userland, with a problem. No one wants her…
Blaise Pascal once famously ended a letter with an apology : I'm sorry that this was such a long letter, but I didn't have time to write you a short one. Computer science has pretty much the same problem. It's a young field, and young fields are, by their nature, messy. As we race to generate new knowledge, we also…